From empires to nations, from nations to empires: the historical journey of the political imaginations

The nation concept and the nation states are more privileged and dominant than any others both in global politics and the local politics.In other words, it is not hard to recognize the position of nation states with a little glance to newspapers, magazines, books, internet etc. So communities seem to have reached an agreement on naturalnessand necessity of national states and nationalist thinking. This has led some scholars to consider the following question: Does the national principle have to be a regulatory rule for both local and global politics? Is there any other political understanding possible? At this point, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri came up with the idea of Empire. According to them, the postmodern revolution in the economy led a transformation in politics, and a new form of power has emerged, apart from the power of nation states which is called the empire. In this context; postmodern empire is a form of power which is fluid, abstract, immanent and operates with flexible boundaries. The empire situates itselfabove and beyond the nation states and that build their power on financial flows. The main argument in this thesis is; that political history is in an in the context of economic paradigms. The oscillation causes the changing in political understanding from empires to nation states and then form nation states to empires again. For this analysis, nationalism in the first chapter, classical empires in the second chapter, and postmodern empire in the third chapter were examined and evaluated within the framework of the process of economic change.